Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Vshadow: Promoting Physical Servers into Virtualization World

  • Published:
International Journal of Parallel Programming Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Though virtualization technology has been widely adopted these years due to its advantages on improving server utilization, reducing management costs and energy consumption, there are still lots of legacy applications deployed in traditional physical machines. How to efficiently promote these physical servers into virtual machines (VMs) if necessary has become an interesting and challenging problem. Existing Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) conversion methods suffer from long server downtime during the converting process, which makes them impractical and inefficient in real world. In this paper, we analyze the reason why the previous approaches result in intolerable server downtime, and propose a new P2V conversion system called Vshadow. It enables a native P2V conversion which can quickly switch physical machine to a local VM, and combines implicit disk replication method and live migration process to promote physical machine into remote virtualization platform. Our experimental results show that Vshadow can reduce the server downtime by more than 90 % compared with existing P2V conversion methods. Besides proving the effectiveness and efficiency of Vshadow, we also illustrate the possible ways to apply Vshadow in server consolidation of cloud data centers and to use Vshadow to build a cost-effective failover system.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13
Fig. 14
Fig. 15
Fig. 16
Fig. 17

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Larger disk size only increases total upgrading time.

  2. http://www.joedog.org/siege-home/.

  3. https://www.phpbb.com/.

References

  1. https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/V2V_Guide/P2V_Migration_Moving_workloads_from_Physical_to_Virtual_Machines-Converting_Physical_Machines_to_Virtual_Machines.html

  2. VMware vCenter Converter Standalone User’s Guide, vCenter Converter Standalone 5.1. http://www.vmware.com/pdf/convsa_51_guide.pdf

  3. Cully, B., Lefebvre, G., Meyer, D., Feeley, M., Hutchinson, N., Warfield, A.: Remus: high availability via asynchronous virtual machine replication. In: Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI’08), 2008, pp. 161–174 (2008)

  4. Barham, P., Dragovic, B., Fraser, K., Hand, S., Harris, T., Ho, A., Neugebauer, R., Pratt, I., Warfield, A.: Xen and the art of virtualization. ACM SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 37(5), 164–177 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Kivity, A., Kamay, Y., Laor, D., Lublin, U., Liguori, A.: kvm: the linux virtual machine monitor. Proc. Linux Symp. 1, 225–230 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Sugerman, J., Venkitachalam, G., Lim, B.-H.: Virtualizing i/o devices on vmware workstation’s hosted virtual machine monitor. In: Proceedings of USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pp. 1–14 (2001)

  7. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/manpage?8+losetup

  8. https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.vcenterhost.doc_50%2FGUID-326DEC3C-3EFC-4DA0-B1E9-0B2D4698CBCC.html

  9. Clark, C., Fraser, K., Hand, S., Hansen, J.G., Jul, E., Limpach, C., Pratt, I., Warfield, A.: Live migration of virtual machines. In: Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI’05), 2005, pp. 273–286 (2005)

  10. Liu, H., Jin, H., Liao, X., Ma, B., Xu, C.: Vmckpt: lightweight and live virtual machine checkpointing. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 55(12), 2865–2880 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Reisner, P., Ellenberg, L.: Replicated storage with shared disk semantics. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Linux System Technology Conference (Linux-Kongress’08), pp. 111–119 (2005)

  12. HP. NonStop Computing . http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/integrity/nonstop.aspx?

  13. Kozuch, M., Satyanarayanan, M.: Internet suspend/resume. In: Proceedings of the 4th IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA’02), 2002, pp. 40–46 (2002)

  14. Barak, A., Guday, S., Wheeler, R.G.: The MOSIX Distributed Operating System: Load Balancing for UNIX. Springer-Verlag New York (1993)

  15. Douglis, F., Ousterhout, J.: Transparent process migration: design alternatives and the sprite implementation. Softw. Pract. Exp. 21(8), 757–785 (1991)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Milojičić, D.S., Douglis, F., Paindaveine, Y., Wheeler, R., Zhou, S.: Process migration. ACM Comput. Surv. (CSUR) 32(3), 241–299 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Osman, S., Subhraveti, D., Su, G., Nieh, J.: The design and implementation of zap: a system for migrating computing environments. ACM SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 36(SI), 361–376 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Song, D., Shi, E., Fischer, I., Shankar, U.: Cloud data protection for the masses. Computer 45(1), 39–45 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Verma, A., Voruganti, K., Routray, R., Jain, R.: Sweeper: an efficient disaster recovery point identification mechanism. In: Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST’08), 2008, p. 20 (2008)

  20. Yu, G., Chuanyi, L., Dongsheng, W.: Fast recovery and low cost coexist: when continuous data protection meets the cloud. IEICE Trans. Inf. Syst. 97(7), 1700–1708 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Jin, H., Deng, L., Wu, S., Shi, X., Pan, X.: Live virtual machine migration with adaptive, memory compression. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing and Workshops (CLUSTER’09), 2009, pp. 1–10 (2009)

  22. Elmore, A.J., Das, S., Agrawal, D., El Abbadi, A.: Zephyr: live migration in shared nothing databases for elastic cloud platforms. In: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data (SIGMOD’11), 2011, pp. 301–312 (2011)

  23. Rajagopalan, S., Cully, B., O’Connor, R., Warfield, A.: Secondsite: disaster tolerance as a service. ACM SIGPLAN Not. 47(7), 97–108 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Soltesz, S., Pötzl, H., Fiuczynski, M.E., Bavier, A., Peterson, L.: Container-based operating system virtualization: a scalable, high-performance alternative to hypervisors. ACM SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 41(3), 275–287 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Xavier, M.G., Neves, M.V., Rossi, F.D., Ferreto, T.C., Lange, T., De Rose, C.A.: Performance evaluation of container-based virtualization for high performance computing environments. In: Proceedings of the 21st Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP’13), 2013, pp. 233–240 (2013)

  26. Yu, H., Xiang, X., Zhao, Y., Zheng, W.: Birds: a bare-metal recovery systemfor instant restoration of data services. IEEE Trans. Comput. 63(6), 1392–1407 (2014)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

The research is supported by National Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61232008 and 61472151, National 863 Hi-Tech Research and Development Program under Grant Nos. 2015AA011402 and 2014AA01A302.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Services Computing Technology and System Lab & Cluster and Grid Computing Lab, School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Song Wu, Yongchang Li, Xinhou Wang, Hai Jin & Hanhua Chen

Authors
  1. Song Wu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Yongchang Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Xinhou Wang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Hai Jin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Hanhua Chen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Song Wu.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Wu, S., Li, Y., Wang, X. et al. Vshadow: Promoting Physical Servers into Virtualization World. Int J Parallel Prog 45, 45–66 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-015-0385-2

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-015-0385-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation